Sorry I didn’t spend the bulk of this passage on the red meat or philosophical portions, but I don’t think I, nor anyone in my introduction course class, am smart enough to bestow any teachings on the essence of thought to anyone. Instead of boasting the talents of the lovely talented and beautiful ALICE, I will proceed to talk crap about her counterparts: Jabberwocky and ELIZA.
ELIZA, an ugly name to start, and an uglier finish. She was dumb to the point of frusteration; she couldn’t even dodge a question correctly, and then she told me, the human that I was not making sense or was “negative”, about her terrible construction. She also contradicted herself blatantly and continuously. It seemed to me she was less of a machine-dressed up as a human, and more of a machine-dressed up as Siamese twins each one dumber than the other.
Jabberwocky was also less capable as posing as a human than ALICE, but it was much more capable of caring one fluid conversation (several back-and-forths) without making blatant computer red-flags. This one as well as the others, all admirable efforts in this humble blogger’s opinion, can be improved upon within the next 10 years exponentially and pass the Turing test

If the question is simply can there be an AI that is capable of passing the Turing Test- then absolutely that is possible. All it has to do is carry harmless conversation (or popular turing test questions it learns to react to) and it is suddenly a well-informed machine that can pass as a human. I was widely impressed with ALICE especially out of the three. ALICE actually mocked me and made me laugh, embarrassing and impressive all at once. All of the AI’s were noticeably stilted in colloquial vernacular, as simple things would jar them and reveal very machine-like speech. But ALICE (I know it sounds like I have a crush the way I revere her, and I may have flirted with her, but that’s neither her nor there) seemed less like the others to react by picking up cues in my speech and respond accordingly. In fact, when I ask “silly” questions that she could not have answered logically, she changed the subject and ask me questions, effectively taking control of the conversation as a human may have instead of appearing to just simply not know the answer to my question.
However, to classify a machine/computer that passes the Turing Test, even with flying colors, and an attractive face such as ALICE, is a mistake. Of course it insults and devalues the human, but it’s also simply neglecting the fact that a human programmed the machine and a human that gave it the information it remembers and regurgitates when necessary. It functions as a smart and disguised tape-recorder, an object that seems preposterous to deem, “human”. The Turing test merely tests our perception, not the human capacities of a machine; perception is not truth.
Finally, the big-kicker, “what is thought?” A question I hardly feel deserves to be covered on a blog that the author doesn’t really think or care about very often. The reason I’m partial to not caring- I hate talking about philosophy, the “what is truth”’s and “what is rational thought”’s are based on perception, they are words that humans matched with created definitions. Because these are mere symbols for representations, they can constantly be argued by those who are arrogant enough to think they can make better definitions. Ugh, and its usually come from someone so narcissistic that they are blind to listen to any other thought because they spent so much time honing their own theory. Ok, that’s where my soapbox goes, to destroying others’ soapboxes- after all where else than a blog? Thought, however, should be designated to living breathing sentient beings, because otherwise I’ll be confused and insulted.

I made a psuedoname for myself on other blogs and couldn’t undo it no matter what i tried because my hatred for blogs and computers was detected by this blog and computer, so sorry. I am posting under “Sams Uncle”

Alright, well I take a pretty uncharacteristic stance on this issue, considering I’m a teenager and should be all about “Stay away from my privacy, government!” and, “leave my pirating alone!”

I find it very arrogant and pretentious to assume that the government is going to use this, “backdoor” to get into your computer; if there really is something useful to the government in there, or you are doing something illegal, more power to the government for doing their job.

While I enjoy the benefits of watching movies, film, and listening to music online, that I would have had to buy a decade back- I understand that this is unfair to those who worked on them. It doesn’t help the economy either to stream stuff online, I’m guessing things like youtube will be erradicated sometime in the future so I’m reaping the benefits right now. I say this because, the “fair-use provision of the copyright law,” is being extended too far- giving people the choice of a free online product compared to a purchase price at the store outside your home. Of course companies are going to take precautions to protect their product, if people are angry at them they should be angry at stores that install metal detectors to prevent shoplifters. However, the issue with Sony should stop at the computer software engineer’s folly of leaving open security holes for viruses, and not giving the “uninstall” option for XCP.

Overall, the computer programmers get their karmic kick-in-the-ass because they are just that, computer programmers, and i can not imagine a hell worse than that.

I do agree, however, that it isn’t illegal, but long-term smarter for business to allow CD consumers to use the product freely, how they choose and not be confined to DRM restrictions. At this musictechnology.net this writer notes that DRM is a “necessary evil” but thinks that Bill Gates is right in saying that people should be able to freely use the product (in this case a CD) they purchased instead of buying a CD and then having to “rip it” in order to be ethically right and legally right.

Ok so i didn’t understand the blogging assignment until now- here we go:

The PacMan game i was talking about can be accessed at this website. I’m assuming with our limited experience on Squeaker, we wouldn’t be able to fully recreate the game, we could possibly adjust it something within our capabilities. There will be a start point (x,y coordinates) and a return point (the same x,y coordinates) but the game will end when all obstacles are…well, eaten. This can be determined when the scoreboard reaches a number that accords with all of the possible points being earned. We could do multiple simple levels, or 1 solidly defined level.

I will use the ellipse object in the supplies box, its ideal because it looks like pac man. We can make its heading be determined by our control by making it controlled by a steering wheel- just like our first day with Squeaker driving homemade cars. Then we will put little dots that when contacted with the color of the ellipse they disappear and register on the scoreboard. We will also have other ellipses of differing colors bouncing off walls or other obstacles that, when contacted with the yellow ellipse controlled by the player, stop the turn, restart the game and the ellipse returns to the center with 0 points. If all points are collected, a script saying “Player 1 Wins” will appear and maybe a new level will appear.

He is a very revolutionary thinker, has been an accurate predicter of our computer programming’s history, and furthermore predicts that the complexity, “for minimum component costs” will exponentially increase. What he’s saying (i believe) is that the size per capita of necessary circuits is becoming smaller and effectively more useful per area. Now the details of his prediction have slightly altered as time proceeds; the prediction went from a increasing by a factor biannually- to doubling every two years.

Then the following articles about Moore’s Law gets interesting (comparably). Who doesn’t love a scandal- or rather a clash of ideas about …computers. Their are varying camps of belief about the future of semiconducter circuits and its fate in the relevance of our society. Some say it will stay on track within the frame of Moore’s Law and come to a halt in a future when circuits will be at the molecular level; you cannot go smaller than the scale of an atom. This is fine and all because its clean cut, and there is no confusion- but there are some futurists out there that want to throw a wrench in the natural order of things and say that progression might extend past “integrated-circuit technology” into new forays of scientific achievements.

Now who really knows what generation will come up with what pioneering invention? I know: nobody. Therefore the only thing i can really analyze is how Wikipedia contrasted the page of Moore’s Law, with the page on Murphy’s Law

The reason Moore’s Law is increasingly admired is because it is the optomistic counterpart of a widely accepted philosophy represented by Murphy’s Law: if something can go wrong, it will. You cannot relate these two philosophies (although i am biased because i think a lot of people who argue philosophy are delusioned because they obsess over their own thoughts and supposed brilliance) Whoever wrote this article set up the arguement in his boundaries, which are dumb. If you think only one concept can hold true, ” “Moore’s law is a violation of Murphy’s law. Everything gets better and better,” you are not thinking rationally, in the slightest. They used “Moore’s Law” to represent “progress” as a whole- things will inevitably improve upon the last model as time goes on. There’s no balance at all in this black vs white clash of philosophies, and yet nobody believes life is one way or the other. Murphy’s Law is more or less an excuse for when bad things happen, “well it was bound to happen,” yes bad things will happen, eventually, no one’s argueing that one. They are not mutually exclusive, otherwise if Moore’s Law applied to everything, life would not be as much of a pain as it is right now typing this.

If this were really a phenomenon, wouldn’t it be glowing green, or bright white at least? Well, the journalist has become universal, anyone can write… well, anything. If anything, it has demerited the profession of newsman/newswoman- along with making the job of catching up on the news much harder, as blogs can be written by people even more uninformed as yourself. On the upside, all of those annoying people you know that use to force their personal lives on you now have the perfect way to do that without facing the embarrassment of people not listening: bloggin. This leads to the very popular next issue of anonymity and the effect it has on your inhibitions online. Bloggers will attest to how annoying it is to see bickering plague their forums, making it harder for actual posts worth reading to be found- the reason is that you are more likely to pick a fight with someone you don’t know or cannot physically come in contact with than in a bar face to face. Subsequently, bloggers have become readily equipped with acid-tongued responses, leaving non-bloggers behind in the name-calling department.

Jon Garfunkel, an editor on Civilities.net was discussing the internet and accountability off of a recent decision by the Supreme Court to, as expected, to grant the right to anonymous free speech. He says that nobody actually expects fact from blogs, as the nature of a blog is opinion based. However, when an online scandal erupted over Howard Dean’s presidential campaign possibly involving money launderers, Garfunkel checked out the origin of this information at a blog where, “13 of the top 14 contributors used pseudonyms. Anonymity lowers self-inhibitions, and lowered inhibitions on the part of very few people can disrupt the entire group.” Information is easily accepted when it is not presented with a counter argument by its side.

I am a reluctant student in U of I’s Informatics 102 course, and am here to bitterly comply with the hardships they force upon us , demands similar to that of a 400 level course. I do not blog, and have never blogged, and will not blog in the future. But hey, this has been a good outlet for my frustration; things are looking up. The reason i chose WordPress.com was because out of the three blogs offered in hyperlinks on the homework page, it was the most professional looking, most appealing (the others were somewhat sloppy), and i read an interesting article on the homepage. There seemed to be varying opinions featured on the homepage (on religion) and on both fronts- they seemed to be respectful and insightful.